Customer Reviews

London Perceived

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Forty-one years ago, V.S. Pritchett went looking for what makes London itself. He wrote this before McDonald's arrived, just before the Beatles and 007 put it on the world's pop map, just as cranes were setting out the beams for glass and steel skyscrapers. Much has happened in the interim, but what Pritchett found explains not only its past but its future. He makes neat work of reconciling the many ironies in a place that reinvents itself every so often without much of a plan, but which also hangs onto traditions, ways of being and a passion for order. This is a tour of neighborhoods, but also of centuries and the historical events and personages that have contributed to the city's enduring character. It moves seamlessly between the concrete image and the abstract idea. Pritchett's prose is crystalline, his insights spooky at times (he describes those new skyscrapers as having a "smashable impermanence" to them). The photographs by Evelyn Hofer are haunting. There will always be a London. This should be required reading for visitors to that city.

This is NOT a travel book.

Hofer's photography is iconic, worthy of a special show at the Tate. You will never happen across her vistas walking or driving around London on your own. She has a Dickensian point of view, and an antiquarian sensibility that would scare away the creator of a standard travel brochure.

V.S. Pritchett will not be found in that brochure either. You may have caught him once or twice in the "New Yorker," but not in the "Saturday Evening Post."

His take on London is not so much a perception as it is a meditation. He is in touch with what we all see in London. And his historic perspective is encyclopedic. He evokes the Blitz in the style of an experienced screenwriter. But his real genius lies in his "meditations," his reaction to what he has seen over the years, and in what he imagines his dramatis personae think about it all.

Read it on the plane over the Atlantic, then go see for yourself.